고용 없는 성장시대의 SW산업 육성정책

Abstract

Whereas IT industry, to be precise, the economic growth centering on IT manufactures is often blamed for having incited “jobless growth” in the Korea’s past ten years, SW industry is now in the spotlight as a new growth engine, owing to its high potential for job creation. However, there exists various chronic problems in manpower, marketplace and policy to overcome for SW industry to comply with the expectation. Those problems particularly include the shortage of high-quality human resources, limited size of domestic demand and inconsistency of policies. Major countries’ experiences in SW industry promotion give us some lessons that it is effective for SW industry to specialize through harnessing inherent national advantages and then expand overseas, together with ensuring effectiveness and consistency of government support and forming high-quality human resource pool. Such instructions indicate that Korea, faced with excessive competition in narrow domestic market and insufficient high-quality human resources, needs to devote herself to promoting export of IT services and import of foreign high class work force at least in the short run. At the same time, it is required for Korean government to pay more attention on enhancing policy efficiency rather than diversity, since policy tools now are quite limited with the advancement of market-opening. In this respect, increasing utilization of SW seems to be highly desirable for Korea to generate job opportunities through convergence of IT and other sectors which is currently under hot discussion, and focus much more on improving durability of created job rather than number.